Geeking with Greg

Friday, November 25, 2016

Some of the tech news I found interesting lately, and you might too. Heavy on the comics this time to lighten the mood:

Jeff Bezos: "Good leaders ... seek to disconfirm their most profoundly-held convictions, which is very unnatural for humans ... Anybody who doesn’t change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in." ([1])

Amazon is hiring 120k employees just for the holidays. I can't believe how our baby is all grown up. ([1])

On building products: "Keep it extremely simple, or two thirds of the population can’t use your design" ([1][2])

"The problem isn't the users: it's that we've designed our computer systems' security so badly that we demand the user do all of these counterintuitive things." ([1])

Great article on Netflix recommendations, tidbits on the importance of reacting immediately to new data, using immediate intent, freshness (esp. new releases), and perceived quality (difference between online evaluation and offline). ([1])

Opinionated summary of RecSys 2016, and also somewhat of a summary of recommendations and personalization research as of 2016 ([1][2])

Xavier Amatriain on lessons learned from building recommender systems ([1])

YouTube is now using deep learning for recommendations, more than just embeddings, includes a ranker with heavily engineered features ([1])

Pfeffer: "You need to be careful with what you measure, because you are going to get it, and often you don’t really want it." ([1][2])

Obama: "Traditionally, when we think about security and protecting ourselves, we think in terms of armor or walls. Increasingly, I find myself looking to medicine and thinking about viruses, antibodies."﻿ ([1])

Surprising, just set up a hotspot, and the interference from people's fingers moving in the WiFi signal is enough to catch most of the passwords anyone enters while connected ([1][2])

"An entire company’s product line has just been turned into a botnet that is now attacking the United States" ([1][2])

Bit.ly short URLs hid malicious content that was then used to get at Colin Powell's e-mail ([1])

AI guru Andrew Ng: "We're lucky the AI community is very open, and top researchers freely share many ideas and even code. This helps the whole field progress. Hope we can keep it that way." ([1][2])

Love this: "Being able to go from idea to result with the least possible delay is key to doing good research" ([1])

Two new massive labeled open data sets from Google, one for images, one for videos ([1][2])

"Translations that are vastly improved compared to the previous phrase-based production system. GNMT reduces translation errors by more than 55%-85% on several major language pairs" ([1])

Google CEO Sundar Pichai: "Our goal is build a personal Google for each and every user." ([1])

I got a mention in The Guardian for some of my past work: "Greg Linden may not be a household name..." ([1])

Data on what Amazon Echo is actually used for. Mostly playing a song, it appears.﻿ ([1])

Like at the last dot-com boom, there are a bunch of delivery services cropping up with models that don't seem like they're likely to be profitable. Uber, which was in a better position than most to do this profitably, just shut their food delivery service down, which doesn't bode well for the others. ([1])

Current state of virtual reality: "None of these uses are particularly compelling right now, especially given the cost of buying a VR headset. This may change in the future." ([1])

"Giving employees hours, days or even months in which to work without close scrutiny has enhanced productivity instead of harming it"﻿ ([1])

T-mobile's CEO on leadership: "Listen to your employees, listen to your customers, shut the f*** up, and do what they tell you" ([1])

Sunday, August 28, 2016

New Yorker on AI: "A lot of what people are calling 'artificial intelligence' is really data analytics -- in other words, business as usual. If the hype leaves you asking 'What is A.I., really?,' don’t worry, you're not alone .... Intelligent software helps us interact and deal with the ... [information] onslaught ... winnowing an increasing number of inputs and options in a way that humans can’t manage without a helping hand .... A set of technologies that try to imitate or augment human intelligence .... [But] we are a long way from creating virtual human beings ... In the meantime, we're going to have to deal with the hyperbole surrounding A.I." ([1])

Tim O'Reilly: "Humans are increasingly going to be interacting with devices that are able to listen to us and talk back .... [Alexa] demonstrates that conversational interfaces can work, if they are designed right .... Smaller domains where you can deliver satisfying results, and within those domains, spend a lot of time thinking through the 'fit and finish' so that interfaces are intuitive, interactions are complete, and that what most people try to do 'just works'." ([1])

Netflix: "We think the combined effect of personalization and recommendations save us more than $1B per year" ([1][2][3])

"The main reasons cited for using ad blockers include avoiding disruptive ads (69%), ads that slow down their browsing experience (58%) and security / malware risks (56%). Privacy wasn’t the top answer. So Facebook thinks if its can make its ads non-interruptive, fast, [useful,] and secure, people won’t mind." ([1][2])

According to the NYT, Uber lost $1.2B on $2.1B in revenue in H1 2016 ([1][2])

"Amazon reaches new high of 268,900 employees — skyrocketing 47% in just one year" ([1])

Amazon's going hard for Netflix on their key vulnerability, strength of the catalog ([1])

Great example of how Bezos sees failure as just a step toward success, following up on their $170M loss from an expensive Amazon Fire Phone with another (and I think very promising) attempt using existing cheap phones ([1][2])

On education: "A feeling of hopefulness actually leads us to try harder and persist longer -- but only if it is paired with practical plans for achieving our goals, and specific, concrete actions we’ll take when and if (usually when) our original plans don’t work out as expected." ([1])

On management: "We have to give them the space to fail in the short term so they can succeed and grow in the long term ... There is that magical moment when we delegate and allow an emerging leader to grow into their new responsibilities, and they end up being way better at it than we ever were. That’s real management success."﻿ ([1][2])

On teams: "The best teams respect one another’s emotions and are mindful that all members should contribute to the conversation equally ... A shared belief that it is safe to take risks and share a range of ideas without the fear of being humiliated."﻿ ([1][2])

SMBC comic on economists and the golden goose, don't miss the mouseover text: "A physicist would figure out how the Goose was transmuting elements without getting to a high temperature, then use the trillions of dollars to build a really sweet fleet of quadcopters" ([1])

Thursday, June 02, 2016

Bezos: "Every single important thing we’ve done has taken a lot of risk, risk-taking, perseverance, guts, and some have worked out. Most of them have not." ([1])

Bezos: "You need to select people who tend to be dissatisfied ... As they go about their daily experiences, they notice that little things are broken in the world and they want to fix them. Inventors have a divine discontent." ([1])

Page: "Is it going to affect everyone in the world? Very few ... think this way." ([1])

"More than anything else, the rise of the bots signals the death of the mobile app ... The whole app thing didn't really work out." ([1][2])

"As it turns out, the mundanity of our regular lives is the most captivating thing we could share with one another" ([1])

"This is the most demonically clever computer security attack I've seen in years ... insert a nearly undetectable backdoor into the chips themselves" ([1])

"Most Android vulnerabilities don't get patched. It's not Google's fault. It releases the patches, but the phone carriers don't push them down to their smartphone users ... This is a long-existing market failure."﻿ ([1])

"Google, with its tech chops and its control over digital ad delivery, is positioned to do what individual publishers and their associations can’t do on their own, though, by requiring that ads are not obtrusive or annoying — a main reason people choose to block ads."﻿ ([1])

"How quickly cars can learn to do the really hard parts of driving ... navigate congested cities in the pouring rain where humans, pets and rodents run into the road" ([1][2][3])﻿

"Tech firms are plundering departments of robotics and machine learning ... for the highest-flying faculty and students, luring them with big salaries ... The field was largely ignored and underfunded during the 'AI winter' of the 1980s and 1990s, when fashionable approaches to AI failed to match their early promise."﻿ ([1])

The FizzBuzz Tensorflow interview "will probably only make sense to people who have gone through really terrible CS interview processes"﻿ ([1][2])

Remarkable, deep networks trained on artistic style, then used to apply those styles to video ([1])

Saturday, May 14, 2016

Code Monster is a tutorial that has been used by hundreds of thousands of children around the world to learn a little about programming. It's a series of short lessons where each lesson involves reading and modifying a small amount of code. Changes to the code show up instantly, students learning by example and by doing.

The lessons content for Code Monster from Crunchzilla is in a JSON file that can be modified fairly easily to create your own content. By open sourcing Code Monster from Crunchzilla, I hope three things might happen:

Translations. Taking the current content and translating into languages other than English for use in more classrooms around the world.

New lessons and new content. By adding new messages and example code to the JSON lessons file, new tutorials could be created for teaching programming games, working through puzzles or math problems, or perhaps a more traditional computer science curriculum aligned with a particular lesson plan.

Entirely new tutorials. Some ideas and techniques used by Code Monster, such as how Code Monster provides informative error messages, how it does live code, or how it avoids infinite loops in students' code, might be useful for others creating web-based coding environments.

Code Monster from Crunchzilla has been used in computer labs and classrooms around the world. One of the most common requests is translations into languages other than English. Now that the code is open source, I hope that makes it easier for translated and modified versions to get in front of even more children.

If you use the code for anything that helps children learn computer programming, I'd love to hear about it (please post a comment here or e-mail me at greg@crunchzilla.com).

Saturday, April 02, 2016

"We simply don't know how to securely engineer anything but the simplest of systems" ([1])

Impressive at their scale: "Facebook ... releases software ... three times a day" and makes configuration changes "thousands of times a day... every single engineer can make live configuration changes." ([1])
﻿

For those of us tracking virtual reality, a detailed review of the Oculus Rift ([1]), a review of Hololens ([2]), and a fun TED talk motivating augmented and virtual reality ([3])

For disk to be the new tape "custom disk designs uniquely targeting cold storage" are required that are "much larger, slower, more power efficient and less expensive." ([1]) Related, Google seeks new disk designs ([2])

Lessons from building AWS, including automate everything and favor primitives over frameworks ([1])

In the AWS service terms: "However, this restriction will not apply ... [when] human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue." ([1])

Google says, "With multi-homing ... failover, recovery, and dealing with inconsistency ... are solved by the infrastructure, so the application developer gets high availability and consistency for free and can focus instead on building their application" ([1][2])

Remarkably successful contest: "The winning team exceeded the power density goal for the competition by a factor of 3 ... Some of us at Google didn’t think such audacious goals could be achieved." ([1])

Netflix's catalog has dropped to 5,532 titles from 8,103 titles in about two years ([1][2])

"The James Webb Space Telescope will be a major advance ... primary mirror will be 50 times [larger] ... eight times the resolution" ([1])

"The price of planetary insurance, it turns out, isn’t all that high." ([1][2])

Teaching math: "In most people’s everyday lives ... what [people] do need is to be comfortable reading graphs and charts and adept at calculating simple figures in their heads ... Decimals and ratios are now as crucial as nouns and verbs." ([1])

He's the "‘seagull of science.’ He used to fly in, squawk, crap over everything, and fly away."﻿ ([1])

Good answer to the question, "What are the most important things for building an effective engineering team?" ([1]) Related, similar advice from Amit Singh ([2][3])

An old Amazon.com office map from early 1997 (back when Amazon only sold books, "Earth's Biggest Bookstore"). My "office" was a card table in a kitchen. ([1])

What If comic: What would happen if you tried to squeeze all the water going over Niagara Falls into a straw? It's worse than you'd think. ([1])﻿

Saturday, March 05, 2016

The world is substantially different than the last time this happened. In particular, there's more computing power available in our smartphones than the most powerful graphics workstations had back in the 1990s. Google Cardboard and others take advantage of that, using a smartphone and little else for a quick-and-dirty virtual reality experience.

But, for a product to appeal to a broad market -- to get beyond early adopters with disposable income seeking to show something cool to friends a couple times -- it needs to survive the harsh judgement of busy people. It isn't enough for virtual reality on expensive dedicated hardware to mostly work. The experience will have to wow repeatedly at a price people like.

So, Daniel and I have another bet: "Virtual reality hardware (not counting cardboard) will not sell more than 10M units/year worldwide before March 2019." I'm saying it won't. Daniel says it will. Loser donates $100 to the winner's choice of charity.

Daniel already posted his side of the bet. In brief, he thinks three years will be enough time for someone to get it right.

I think that mainstream adoption of dedicated hardware for virtual reality requires breakthroughs in usability and price that are too difficult to achieve in the three year time frame. The experience just isn't good enough yet for it to be anything other than a toy for early adopters. Current virtual reality hardware is bulky, expensive, not fully immersive, and not addictive or compelling beyond the initial wow. I expect even the next generation will just be a niche market (low million units per year) until we see major developments on price, form factor, and quality of the experience.

There are several wild cards here. For example, it is possible that much cheaper units can be made to work. It's possible that someone discovers very carefully chosen environments and software tricks fool the brain into fully accepting the virtual reality, especially for gaming, increasing the appeal and making it a must-have experience for a lot of people. As unsavory as it is, pornography is often a wild card with new technology, potentially driving adoption in ways that can determine winners and losers. A breakthrough in display (such as retinal displays) might allow virtual reality hardware that is much cheaper and lighter. Business use is another unknown where virtual reality could provide a large cost savings over physical presence. I do think there are many ways in which I could lose this bet.

Like Daniel, I'll add some constraints to make my side of the bet even harder. I'd be surprised if dedicated virtual reality hardware sells more than 10M total over all three years. I'd also be surprised if virtual reality using smartphones (like Google Cardboard) goes beyond a toy, so, is used regularly by tens of millions for gaming, education, or virtual tourism.

And, like Daniel, I expect virtual reality to be big eventually, am frustrated by our current computing limitations, and think we should work to have much better from our computing devices today.

Saturday, February 27, 2016

In 2012, Professor Daniel Lemire and I bet $100 over the question of whether tablets would replace PCs.

Specifically, the bet was, "In some quarter of 2015, the unit sales of tablets will be at least twice the unit sales of traditional PCs, in the USA." Loser donates $100 USD to the charity of the winner's choice.

It's 2016, and tablet sales went far higher than I ever expected, approaching PC sales, roughly 60M/year units for both tablets and PCs in the US. But tablet sales seem to have peaked, with Q4 2015 unit sales worldwide actually 14% lower than the previous year, which is worse than the 8% decline in PC sales.

There are other surprises. One of my concerns was that a very cheap tablet would dominate the market, and Amazon did come out with a $50 tablet that got relatively good reviews and nearly tripled Amazon's market share on tablets. There hasn't been enough time yet to see what happens with very cheap tablets, but tablets this cheap are a different category than the tablets that were around in 2012.

Another concern at the time was hybrid tablets, so tablets with detachable keyboards that function a lot like laptops, and whether they'd blur the line between PC and tablet. Hybrid tablets have done very well -- a major category in tablets -- and look likely to continue to grow over time.

The last concern at the time was whether tablets could thrive despite the pressure from increasingly larger and more powerful mobile phones. That seems to have been the biggest issue. Phablets are getting as large as early tablets, and tablets that try to be much bigger than a smartphone proved too unwieldy and sold poorly. After all, who needs a tablet when you've got a mobile that's almost as large?

The broader question in the bet was whether people would stop using PCs. PC sales have been in decline, though the pace of that decline has slowed recently. What seems to be happening is that people are continuing to use multiple devices, which was a visible trend back in 2012.

A phone is great when you want to do something quickly on the run. A bigger screen is good when you need to do a lot of reading. A keyboard, mouse, and large screen become useful when you're producing instead of consuming. If you need to do all of these, there's no reason to only have a phone, only a tablet, or only a PC. Instead, people often have all three and more.

Even though I technically won this bet, I want to congratulate Daniel Lemire on this getting much closer than I ever expected. I also admire the bravery he had to take the bet, especially with such favorable terms, and appreciate what I learned from this. The terms were that the loser donate $100 to the charity of the winner's choice, and I'd like to match the donation. Daniel and I will both be donating $100 to the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia.

Sunday, January 17, 2016

"Big ideas emerge from spills, crashes, failed experiments and blind stabs .... As people dredge the unknown, they are engaging in a highly creative act .... the habits that transform a mistake into a breakthrough" ([1])

Lots of details on recommendations, personalization, and experimentation at Netflix in a new ACM paper ([1])

Fun and interesting Slate article on how Facebook selects posts for the news feed ([1])

New paper claims the filter bubble for news is much stronger in what people self-select and on social media than in search and recommendations ([1])

"Bayesian program learning (BPL) framework, capable of learning a large class of visual concepts from just a single example and generalizing in ways that are mostly indistinguishable from people" ([1][2][3])

NIPS 2015 paper on problems that accumulate in machine learning systems, such as dependencies between features, dependencies between models that build off each other, and complicated and fragile data preprocessing ([1])

"Should they teach [self-driving] cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?"﻿ ([1])

Wal-mart is doing poorly against Amazon, which is surprising, I think ([1])

Good article on product management. I particularly like the points that most products fail (so you should expect to experiment, adapt, and iterate) and that a good product is about experiences not features ([1])

"People keep mentioning how different things are to the period just before the AI winter"﻿ ([1])

"Smartwatches still have a long way to go in terms of proving their usefulness, necessity, and style" ([1])

"CYA security: given the choice between overreacting to a threat and wasting everyone's time, and underreacting and potentially losing your job, it's easy to overreact." ([1])

Saturday, January 02, 2016

I've been working on a couple educational projects since Google, SwipeLingo and Javascript Notebook.
SwipeLingo is a quick matching game for touchscreens. Javascript Notebook is a tool for writing coding tutorials, exercises, and examples.

I'm unable to fully finish them and get them exactly where I wanted them before starting at Microsoft. But I'm launching anyway in case they or the ideas in them are useful to others.

SwipeLingo is a game-with-a-purpose, a quick matching game that is both fun and helps with memorization like flash cards do. There are example games — particularly interesting is Chinese numbers, where you learn the characters pretty quickly after starting with wild guessing — and it's also easy to create your own. I was motivated to create SwipeLingo by loving Duolingo but wanting the vocabulary memorization in it to be more fun, and also wanting to try to build a non-native touch web app game that works equally well across desktop, laptop, tablet, and phone.

Javascript Notebook tries to make it easy to write and share coding tutorials, coursework, examples, exercises, and experiments. It was heavily motivated by Stanford's CS101 class and their content. Here are some examples: "Getting Started", "Introduction to Programming", "What You Can Do". It's a bit like a simple Javascript-only IPython Notebook in feel, but runs entirely in the browser, requiring no configuration or set up, just write and share. Others can modify the code, run it, and save and share their own copies.

Please let me know if take a look and have any comments or suggestions. And please tell others who might be interested about them too!

Monday, December 28, 2015

I'm joining Microsoft! I'll be part of the excellent Analysis and Experimentation team, helping people learn from data. I'm excited!

I've been geekingoutwithbigdata from before data science was a thing and before being a geek ever could be considered a compliment. Fortwodecades, I've enjoyed looking at the paths people take online, where they find success and where they become annoyed, and how changes can help more find success.

Sometimes this is prioritizing things people like and find useful.
Sometimes it is changing or eliminating things that, despite the good intentions of the developers and designers, don't work for people.
Sometimes it is anonymously sharing things that only some people found with others who haven't found it yet.
And sometimes it is having humility about being able to guess what will work and deciding to try many things to discover what actually does work.

If you're at Microsoft, whether an old friend, a team looking to talk about recommendations, personalization, data science, and experimentation, or just looking to chat, please get in touch! I'd love to hear from you.

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Tog (of the famous Tog on Interface) says Apple has lost its way on design: "Apple is destroying design. Worse, it is revitalizing the old belief that design is only about making things look pretty. No, not so! Design is a way of thinking, of determining people’s true, underlying needs, and then delivering products and services that help them." ([1][2])

Good advice on adding features to a product: "'Great or Dead', as in, if we can't make a feature great, it should be killed off." ([1])

Great data on smartphone and tablet ownership. Sometimes it's hard to remember that only five years ago most people didn't have smartphones. ([1])

Advice for anyone thinking of doing a startup. Here's the conclusion: "So all you need is a great idea, a great team, a great product, and great execution. So easy! ;)"﻿ ([1])

"People might think that human-level AI is close because they think AI is more magical than it actually is"﻿ ([1])

"VCs hate technical risk. They’re comfortable with market risk, but technical risk is really difficult for them to reconcile."﻿ ([1])

Google finds eliminating bad advertisements increases long-term revenue, concluding: "A focus on user satisfaction could help to reduce the ad load on the internet at large with long-term neutral, or even positive, business impact." ([1][2])

"One of the great mysteries of the tech industry in recent years has been the seeming disinterest of Google, which is now called Alphabet, in competing with Amazon Web Services for corporate customers."﻿ ([1])

"Maybe part of AWS value prop is the outsourcing of outages: when half the net is offline, any individual down site doesn't look as bad." ([1])

"87% of Android devices are vulnerable to attack by malicious apps ... because manufacturers have not provided regular security updates"﻿ ([1])

Another interesting camera technology: "17 different wavelengths ... software analyzes the images and finds ones that are most different from what the naked eye sees, essentially zeroing in on ones that the user is likely to find most revealing"﻿ ([1])

And another: "Take a short image sequence while slightly moving the camera ... to recover the desired background scene as if the visual obstructions were not there" ([1])

Useful to know: "Survey results are mostly unaffected when the non-Web respondents are left out."﻿ ([1])

Surprising finding, meal worms can thrive just eating styrofoam: "the larvae lived as well as those fed with a normal diet (bran) over a period of 1 month" ([1])

"We see people turning onto, and then driving on, the wrong side of the road a lot ... Drivers do very silly things when they realize they’re about to miss their turn ... Routinely see people weaving in and out of their lanes; we’ve spotted people reading books, and even one [driver] playing a trumpet."﻿ ([1])

A fun and cool collection of messed up images out of Apple maps. It's almost art. ([1])

Sunday, August 30, 2015

I joined Google a few months ago. I've wanted to work at Google for a long time. I first interviewed there back in 2003!

I've written on this blog since 2004, during Findory and beyond, but, like many blogs, posts have slowed in recent years. Unfortunately, I don't expect to be able to post much here in the coming months either.

Thanks for reading all these years. I hope you enjoyed this blog, and I hope to be able to post frequently again at some point in the future.

Friday, May 01, 2015

Amazon cloud computing has 17% operating margins, surprisingly high given all the competition ([1][2])

Microsoft appears to be claiming they're going to be bigger than Amazon AWS in three years ([1])

But Amazon's Andy Jassy says, "One of the biggest surprises around this business has been how long it took the old guard companies to try and pursue an offering. None of us thought we would get a seven-year head start.”﻿ ([1])

Monday, April 06, 2015

I have a long interview with the Internet History Podcast mostly about Amazon around 1997, especially the personalization, recommendation engine, and data-driven innovations at Amazon, and the motivation behind them.

I think the interview a lot of fun. It gives a view of what Amazon was like way back when it was just a bookstore only in the US, had just one webserver, and we barely could keep the website up with all the growth.

Lots of history of the early days of the web, well before CSS and Javascript, before cookies were even widely supported, and before scale out, experimentation and A/B testing, and large scale log analysis were commonplace.

Give the podcast a listen if you are interested in what the Web looked like back in 1997 and the motivation behind Amazon's personalization and recommendations.

Saturday, March 07, 2015

Data Maven from Crunchzilla is a light introduction to statistics and data analysis.

For too many teens and adults, if they think about statistics at all, they think it's boring, tedious, or too hard. Too many people have had the experience of trying to learn statistics, only to get bogged down in probability, theory, and math, without feeling that they were able to do anything with it.

Instead, your first exposure to statistics should be fun, interesting, and mostly easy.
Data Maven from Crunchzilla is more of a game than a tutorial. To play, you answer questions and solve problems using real data. Statistics is your tool, and data provides your answers. At the end of Data Maven, you'll not only know a bit about statistics, but also maybe even start to think of statistics as fun!

Like programming, statistics and data analysis are tools that make you more powerful. If you know how to use these tools, you can do things and solve problems others cannot. Increasingly, across many fields, people who understand statistics and data analysis can know more, learn more, and discover more.

Data Maven is not a statistics textbook. It is not a statistics class. It is an introduction. Data Maven demystifies statistics. Teens and adults who try Data Maven build their intuition and spark their curiosity for statistics and data.

Monday, March 02, 2015

Great TED talk titled "The mathematics of love", but probably should be titled "A data analysis of love" ([1])

Manned submarines are about to become obsolete and be replaced by underwater drones ([1][2][3])

"No other algorithm scaled up like these nets ... It was a just a question of the amount of data and the amount of computations." ([1][2])

What Google has done is a little like taking a person who's never heard a sound before, not to mention ever hearing language before, and trying to have them learn how to transcribe English speech ([1][2])

Teaching a computer to achieve expert level play of old video games by mimicking some of the purpose of sleep ([1][2])

"Possibly the largest bank theft the world has seen" done using malware ([1])

"Users will prioritise immediate gain, and tend to dismiss consequences with no immediate visible effect"﻿ ([1][2])

"Crowds can't be trusted". It's "really a game of spamfighting". ([1][2])

SMBC comic: "All we have to do is build a trustworthiness rating system for all humans" ([1])

Dilbert describes most business books: "He has no idea why he succeeded"﻿ ([1])

Architect Clippy: "I see you have a poorly structured monolith. Would you like me to convert it into a poorly structured set of microservices?"﻿ ([1])

Man kicks robot dog. Watching the video, doesn't it make you feel like the man is being cruel? The motion of the robot struggling to regain its balance is so lifelike that it triggers an emotional response. ([1][2][3])

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Some of the advertising out there is getting spooky. If you look at a product at many online stores, that product will then follow you around the web.

Go to BBC News, for example, and there will be those dishes you were looking at yesterday on Overstock. Not just any dishes, the exact same dishes. Just in case you forgot about them, there they are again next time you go. And again. And again.

A few years ago, I wrote an article, "What to advertise when there is no commercial intent?". That article suggested that, on sites like news sites, we might not have immediate commercial intent, and might have to reach back into the past to find strong commercial intent. It advocated for personalized advertising that helped people discover interesting products and deals related to strong commercial intent they had earlier.

However, this did not mean that you should just show the last product I looked at. That is refinding, not personalized recommendations. Refinding is all a lot of these ads are doing. You look at a chair, ads follow you around the web showing you ads for that same chair that you already know about over and over again. That's not discovery. That's spooky and not helpful.

Personalized ads should help people discover things they don't know about related to past purchase intent. If I look at a chair, show me highly reviewed similar furniture and good coupons and big deals related in some non-obvious way to that chair and that store. Don't just show me the same chair again. I know about that chair. Show me something I don't know. Help me discover something I haven't found yet.

I understand the reason these companies are doing refinding is because it's hard to do anything better. Doing useful recommendations of related products and deals is hard. Helping people discover something new and interesting is hard. Personalized recommendations requires a lot of data, clever algorithms, and a huge amount of work. Refinding is trivially easy.

But publishers aren't doing themselves any favors by allowing these startups to get away with this kind of useless advertising. As a recent study says, "the practice of running annoying ads can cost more money than it earns." That short-term revenue bump from these spooky refinding ads is like a sugar rush, feels good while it lasts, but hurts in the long-term.

They can and should do better. Personalization, including personalized advertising, should be about helping people discover things they could not easily find on their own. Personalization should not be refinding, just showing what I found before, just exposing my history. Personalization should be helpful. Personalization should be discovery.